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Today we are extremely excited to announce what we believe to be not just a new feature within Blueprint, but a paradigm shift in what it means to offer measurement-based mental healthcare.
Blueprint Interventions is now live in our platform and offers Blueprint clinicians data-driven guidance on how best to respond to trends and significant events in their client’s lives. It brings together the power of data with our team’s industry-leading clinical expertise to enable a truly new and unique care experience.
How we got here
When we started Blueprint in 2019, measurement-based care was still a nascent concept in mental healthcare. Sure, some clinicians were giving clients a PHQ-9 during intake. But the vast majority weren’t gathering routine treatment response data throughout care, despite the decades of research supporting that this leads to better client outcomes.
Our mission at Blueprint has always been centered around improving client outcomes. And as the old adage goes, you cannot manage what you don’t measure. Thus, for the first 24 months of our company’s existence, we were exclusively and relentlessly focused on making it easy and automated for clinicians to measure treatment response and outcomes. While this push towards measurement-based care is coming from all angles (payors, clinicians, and clients), we’ve been fortunate to be at the forefront of this movement, often helping mental health clinicians incorporate outcome measures and other sources of data into care delivery for the first time.
As we embarked on this journey, we quickly learned that with greater clinician access to data comes greater responsibility to act on this data. We also learned that providing consistent, high-quality, evidence-based care is hard! And traditional measurement-based care (gathering data and spitting back out raw results) wasn’t always making it easier for a busy clinician dealing with complex client issues.
Measurement-Based Care, Phase II
As we enter 2022, we’re excited to ring in what we believe to be the start of Phase II of measurement-based mental healthcare.
In Phase I, we built the foundation and systems to gather mental health treatment response and outcomes data at scale. This is what has allowed us to unlock Phase II of Blueprint, which is about taking what’s working and what’s not working during treatment and sharing those insights back with our clinicians so that they can intervene at the point of care.
For example, if a client screens positively for suicidal ideation on a PHQ-9, Blueprint will now proactively surface up to the clinician the leading evidence-based interventions that have the highest probability of positively impacting the client’s response to treatment and overall prognosis. The clinician can review these suggestions and collaboratively engage in the therapeutic activities live with the client during a session.
Not only are these interventions presented to clinicians at the right time, Blueprint also creates a shared space for clients and clinicians to complete these activities together online or in the office. Clinical documentation is automatically generated and clinicians can assign related homework activities for clients to continue the therapeutic process outside of session.
Clinical Decision Support is not a new concept in healthcare. But until today, this type of tooling has not been available to the majority of therapists, counselors, social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists. And it hasn’t been possible to deliver this type of support in an adaptive way based on how an individual client is progressing throughout their treatment journey.
We’re just getting started, but we’re excited about what the future holds. We look forward to the day when all clinicians, regardless of training, orientation, or experience level, can offer effective, efficient, and individualized mental healthcare enabled through the power and promise of data. More importantly, we strive for a day where high-quality evidence-based care is accessible to all.
By Clinicians For Clinicians
We thrive on feedback at Blueprint. This new product was built out of countless hours spent with our clinical community. We are grateful to all of our customers, clinicians, and clients for partnering with us on this journey and pushing us to redefine what measurement-based mental healthcare means.
We definitely don’t have all the answers, but I do think we’re great listeners and even better collaborators. We’d love to hear what you think of this new release and where you want to see it go from here!
